Final Arete - Volume 4, No 1 Fall Winter 2026

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership | Vol. 1 No. 4 | 2026

attended for the first time. These attendance patterns are consistent with the characterization of sustained cultural participation as identity-forming and reinforced by social belonging in serious leisure theory (Stebbins, 2015). Psychographically, respondents were asked to select all the attendance motivations that applied; supporting the local arts community was the most frequently cited (68%, n = 56), followed by specific repertoire or composers (63%, n = 52), guest artists (38%, n = 31), and socializing with friends or family (34%, n = 28). The primacy of community support as a motivational frame suggests that for many THSO patrons, attendance functions as an act of civic investment, a distinction that has direct implications for cultivating such donors. Audience members motivated by institutional loyalty rather than programmatic preferences may be more responsive to philanthropic appeals grounded in community impact than to specifics of artistic programming.

Table 1 Demographic Profile of Current THSO Audience Members (n = 79)

Characteristic

Category

n 7

%

Age

18 – 35 36 – 55

8.9%

17 55 10 21 33 14 10 27 27

21.5% 69.6% 12.8% 26.9% 42.3% 17.9% 12.2% 32.9%

> 55

Education

High school / Some college

Bachelor’s degree Master’s degree Doctoral degree

Income

< $50,000

$50,000 – $100,000 $100,000 – $300,000

32.9% Note. Percentages may not sum to 100 because of rounding and prefer not to say” responses. Source: Author’s analysis of current audience survey data (2026).

RQ2: Educational Programming and the Digital Gateway The educator survey (n = 19) yielded uniformly positive assessments of the THSO educational programming. Seventy-four percent of educators rated the most recent THSO program as excellent (n = 14), and 21% rated it as very good (n = 4); no educator rated the program as fair or poor. Student engagement was similarly exceptional: 60% of educators (n = 12) reported that students were very engaged during the program, and 35% (n = 7) reported extremely engaged. Combined agree and strongly agree responses exceeded 95% for both age-appropriateness and curriculum alignment. As indicated in Table 2, 84% indicated that they were very likely to request another THSO program, 95% were very likely to recommend THSO to colleagues, and 84% were very likely to encourage student families to attend a concert, constituting a net promoter profile that is rarely achieved in arts-education assessment.

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